Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon

Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon

If, as this book suggests, the architect of the 2008 financial meltdown grew up in a small Minnesota town rather than on the Upper Eastside or Greenwich, Connecticut, then we may have more to worry about than we thought. This is a riveting book of chapter and verse on the origins of the crisis, its enablers, and its accelerating course through the 1990's and 2000's. It names names and spares no one - Democrat nor Republican, public servant nor private actor - but, it focuses its fury on James Johnson, CEO of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998 who was born and grew up in Benson, Minnesota. It reads like a whodunit as well it should and it's hard to escape the conclusion that wealldunit under the feckless "leadership" of the White House, the Congress, and the regulatory agencies and the unrelentingly aggressive and self-serving "leadership" of the titans of Wall Street.